These Boots are Made for Walking

Well, we’ve done it: we’ve walked from one end of England to the other, and the question that is most important--as it has been at other points of this trip--is ‘have I gained or lost weight?’

If you are a 40-year-old male, mostly human, with a bit of a gut, you need to take in the following fuel in order to walk across a country in sixteen days:

· 32 Cumberland sausages

· 16 fried eggs

· 16 fried tomatoes

· .5 kilogram fried mushrooms

· 32 rashers of bacon

· .5 kilogram baked beans

· 3 kilograms deep-fried potato wedges

· 3 kilograms deep-fried haddock

· 3 kilograms sundry pies

· 20 litres ale or cider

· 16 Snickers or Mars bars

· 16 ham and cheese sandwiches

· 16 bags crisps

This all works out to 30, 852 calories. (Go ahead, Malcolm, check my facts.) If you’re a male, mostly human, 40-year-old with a bit of a gut, you burn about 408 calories every hour when you walk vigorously across a country with lots of hilly bits. Cara and I figure that we crossed the country in about 96 hours, so I burned about 39, 168 calories. That means I burned 8, 316 calories more than I consumed.

It takes 3, 500 calories to make a pound of fat, which means that I should have lost 2.376 pounds. You’re not going to believe this, but that is, in fact, just about exactly how much weight I lost. All in all, what my calculations show, is that our cross-country trip was in no way worth the effort: I could lose 2.376 pounds just by snoring slightly more vigorously while I sleep instead of humping my way across boggy hills for sixteen days.

Ah, but what a trip. You’ll have to excuse me for taking refuge in calorie counting rather than trying to describe this magnificent walk from West to East. Wordsworth lived right in the middle of this trail, and he’s a pretty good poet, and he had to invent Romanticism just to begin to do justice to the Lake District. So, our trip in three photos:

Dipping our boots in the Irish Sea


Lots of lovely bits in between seas


Dipping our boots in the North Sea